Our bee friends have certain unhealthy behaviors for the hive and scary for passers-by. A behavior, swarming, happens when a hive separates naturally with a group of bees following a new queen. This is a delicate time for the hive and could lead to hungry bees and a dead queen. In other words, it’s bad.
A beekeeper, Herbert M. Aumann, has a solution. Its system is a small vibration and motion sensor that attaches to the outside of a hive and transmits data about the behavior of bees. Beekeepers are able to divide the hives before the swarm begins, and so this system uses the two sensors to capture the behavior before it cascades.
“This sensor is attached to the outside of a hive, near the entrance to the hive,” Aumann wrote in a is studying at IEEE Sensors Letters. “The outward-facing sensor is a 24 GHz continuous wave Doppler radar for monitoring the flight activity of bees. The inward-facing sensor is a piezoelectric transducer. Unlike a conventional microphone that would pick up the sounds that bees make, the piezoelectric transducer takes over the accidental vibrations transmitted by the activity of bees to the hive structure. ”
The system then calculates the probability of a swarm and notifies the beekeeper so that he can keep his small yellow and black loads safe. When bees gather before a swarming event, the sensor will sense the vibrations of the event, allowing the beekeeper to stop the activity by modifying the hive box enough to hold the bees in place. The sensor can also notify the beekeeper of the robbery of events when bees outside a hive take over an entire hive and steal honey from weaker bees.
“Ever since I spent my career building radar systems for tracking small targets, I thought I could use a low-power radar to observe bees from about ten meters away. I really could, ”said Aumann Spectrum. “Amazingly, the signals the radar picked up could be turned into an acoustic signal that sounded exactly like the signal you heard sitting next to the hive.”
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He built a startup, MaineBiosensors, to produce these electronics for beekeepers who want to keep their little friends who produce honey healthy and happy. He’s not selling them yet, but expects to have consumption patterns soon.